The 29-year-old woman decided she was done turning tricks for $15. When the week was over, she was going to quit and go back home to Miami and her 12-year-old daughter.

She had been rotating work locations on a weekly basis, performing sexual acts in 15-minute intervals for $15 apiece, from 11 in the morning until 10 at night during workweeks that started on Mondays and finished on Sundays.

But this would be her last rotation, she told a fellow prostitute. She just had to finish out the week. Then she would go home.

She never did. That Saturday morning, July 22, 2006, Marcelino-Sanchez would be found in a closet of a bedroom in a cathouse on River Avenue, a fatal shotgun wound to her abdomen.

Her killer has never been found.

But detectives haven't given up on solving her murder. They believe somebody knows something that can lead them to her killer.

Detectives aren't even sure how the crime went down, or exactly when. The little they do know comes from a fellow prostitute working with Marcelino-Sanchez during her last week, the pimp who ran the house of ill repute where they were working, and another man found hiding in the rafters of the house after pandemonium broke out that morning.

The day before, Marcelino-Sanchez and fellow prostitute Claudia Hernandez worked a typical shift, detectives said. There were "quite a few people coming through the house," but none of them complained they were shortchanged or caused any sort of problems, said Lakewood Detective Sgt. Robert M. Humeny.

The customers would buy a ticket from the operator of the cathouse for $30, take the ticket upstairs to one of the two bedrooms and spend 15 minutes doing whatever they wanted with one of the women, TrujilloTovar said. At the end of the week, the women would get half of the money and be sent on to work in a new location, he said. Meanwhile, the pimp, Genaro Manuel Campos Conde, kept the remaining proceeds, TrujilloTovar said.

Police wouldn't become aware of the prostitution operation until after Marcelino-Sanchez was murdered.

That Friday, she and Hernandez finished their shifts, took showers and went to bed. Campos Conde, known as "Gordo," the Spanish word for fat, was downstairs watching television with another man, Gilberto Bonilla Alamedo.

Sometime after midnight, Hernandez was awakened by the noise of men kicking in the front door, TrujilloTovar said. She locked herself in her bedroom, but a thin, 6-foot-tall, light-skinned black man with long dread locks and a bandana covering his face kicked in the door and placed a handgun to her head, said Capt. Vincent Frulio of the prosecutor's Major Crimes Unit.

When he heard the door being kicked in, Campos Conde at first thought it was a police raid, and he ran from the house, Frulio said. Chasing him, he said, were three black men, who he soon realized weren't cops, he would later tell the police.

Bonilla Alamedo, meanwhile, ran to the attic and hid in the rafters in fear, TrujilloTovar said.

Pleading for her life

Hernandez was pleading for her life when she heard a gunshot, Frulio said. A second black man, this one 5-foot-10 and stocky, with dark skin and a bandana covering his face, would then appear in the bedroom with a shotgun, he said. He pointed the shotgun at Hernandez and demanded money, he said. She gestured to her black leather purse in the closet, the stocky man grabbed it, and the bandits fled with the $660 it contained, Frulio said.

Hernandez made her way to the bedroom next door. She discovered Marcelino-Sanchez shot in the abdomen, TrujilloTovar said. The badly wounded woman was still alive but unable to speak when Hernandez found her, he said.

Bonilla Alamedo was still hiding in the attic, listening to the commotion. He could hear Hernandez sobbing and speaking to Marcelino-Sanchez in Spanish, Humeny said.

"She started to cry and tell the victim, 'Oh, my God, it happened,' " TrujilloTovar said.

"According to Claudia, this was the last time the victim was going to do this kind of work, and she was going to go back to Miami to be with her 12-year-old daughter," TrujilloTovar said.

Hernandez gave the victim some water, ran out of the house and left her there to die. She walked along River Avenue, which is also Route 9, until a courier for LabCorp, driving a white van, picked her up and gave her a ride to Latino Express taxi company on Clifton Avenue, TrujilloTovar said. There, she called her brother, who came from North Jersey to pick her up.

Police wouldn't learn of the murder until what they estimate to be about two hours after it occurred.

When Campos Conde fled out the back door of the house, he ran toward what was then a construction site and now a condo complex, and he hid there until he believed the coast was clear, Humeny said. Then, he walked to a home on nearby Hadassah Lane, rang the bell and asked the occupants to call the police to report "a suspicious incident involving a firearm," Humeny said.

Police got the call at 3:54 a.m. Campos Conde directed them to the house on River Avenue. He told them he had been hiding in the construction site for about two hours before he went to report the incident. He said he believed the trouble started around 2 a.m.

When police got to the house, they found Bonilla Alamedo still hiding in the rafters in the attic. Patrolman Sean Doyle discovered Marcelino-Sanchez, lying in the closet of the bedroom, dead from a shotgun wound to the abdomen. The closet door was open, and her belongings, including her pocketbook with $63.54, were undisturbed in the bedroom, TrujilloTovar said.

Why was she shot?

The detectives can only speculate about what happened there. Frulio ponders whether there may have been a language barrier when the gunman came into the bedroom seeking money. Marcelino-Sanchez may have been shot because she wasn't quick enough to comply, he theorized.

But Humeny said at least one of the bandits was heard making his demand for money in Spanish.

Humeny speculates that Marcelino-Sanchez heard the noise, hid in the closet and may have startled the gunman when he came in, causing the gun to go off inadvertently.

There was no shotgun shell found in the room, which means that either the gunman didn't eject it and therefore didn't plan to fire another round, or he picked it up and took it with him, the detectives said.

Police had little to go on from the onset. They checked surveillance videotapes at a gasoline station across the street and at what was then Kimball Medical Center a block away, but the tapes showed nothing that would help in the investigation.

Detectives found no forensic evidence of any value at the crime scene, and a canvas of the area turned up no clues.

Campos Conde told the detectives that three men chased him, but he was unable to describe them. Detectives are unsure whether that is true, or if he fabricated it as an excuse for why he didn't go to the defense of the women, Humeny said. The investigators questioned whether Campos Conde, whose nickname "Gordo" stemmed from his physique, was even in any physical condition to run away from three men who were chasing him.

Campos Conde told investigators there was a Jeep in the driveway of the house with its floodlights on, but he couldn't provide a specific model, a license plate number, a year or even a color of the vehicle, Frulio said. Police stopped a Jeep in Lakewood later that morning, but determined its occupants weren't involved in the shooting, he said.

"Every time we got a fact from him (Campos Conde), we don't know it's a fact," Humeny said. "There was a lot we weren't able to corroborate."

Campos Conde and Bonilla Alamedo, who were prosecuted for running a prostitution ring, have been deported to Mexico, Frulio said.

Facts are unclear

Detectives, because they are leery of Campos Conde's version of events, aren't even sure how many culprits were involved in the cathouse invasion. There could have been as few as two, based on Hernandez's account, or as many as five, from what Campos Conde told the detectives, according to Frulio.

Hernandez, who was tracked down by police later the same day, proved to be the most helpful. She gave police descriptions of the two gunmen. As it turned out, two men fitting that description were at the cathouse a few nights earlier, Frulio said.

Hernandez, however, was never able to pick out the gunmen from a number of photographic lineups that were shown to her, Frulio said. And, because the faces of the gunmen were covered with bandanas, it would have been futile to devise police sketches of them, he said.

Detectives got little help from the streets, although at one point, they did get a tip purporting to tell them the location of the murder weapon, Humeny said. When they recovered that weapon, it was a different caliber than the one used to murder Marcelino-Sanchez, he said.

Then the tips dried up.

Despite that, there is at least one person other than the actual murderer who knows the identity of the culprit.

"There was more than one person in the house, and not everyone pulled the trigger," Humeny said.

TrujilloTovar said he is hopeful someone will come forward with information that can help detectives solve Marcelino-Sanchez's murder.

"Her daughter is now 20 years old. It would be nice for her to know what happened," TrujilloTovar said.

Do you have an unsolved mystery you want to learn more about? Contact Kathleen Hopkins at 732-643-4202 or email Khopkins@app.com

POLICE NEED YOUR HELP

Anyone with information on the murder of Isabel Marcelino-Sanchez is asked to call Lakewood Detective Sgt. Robert M. Humeny at 732-363-0200, ext. 5339, or Detective Sgt. Carlos TrujilloTovar of the Ocean County Prosecutor's Office at 732-929-2027, ext. 3468.